The Window Shut The Door (or, backwards healing)

My little storm had been brewing for couple of weeks. The tears were there, in the corners of my temples, and I just couldn’t make them come out. Two Fridays ago, I was so sad and needed to cry so badly that I was mentally scrolling through my log of past friends and acquaintances to think of anyone I could call who might hate me, just so that that person would make me cry. If I’d had a video store nearby that was still open I would have gone and picked up Beaches or When A Man Loves A Woman. I tried listening to Susie Suh, Damien Rice, Sarah Maclachlan, anyone who would depress me, and I even squirmed under my bed to find the banned CD's that remind me of my ex. And finally I uncorked a bottle of red wine in a last-ditch attempt to somehow pull out the tears that so desperately needed to come. Still...nothing.

This Thursday, while hurriedly, scattily, getting myself ready for two classes and a subsequent semi-date, they came. Not just one tear, not just two tears, but a torrent of tears that so intensely progressed to a type of crying where my body forced me down into a curled-up sitting position on the floor and I had to hug my knees like I was afraid I was going to lose all of my pieces if I didn't physically concentrate on keeping them together.

The anger came with the tears. Not at me, at him - at my ex. In the form of “fuck you, how could you put me in this position to have to try again, to have to arrange dates and dress myself up and shift my life around so I can begin this process all over.” And then the root of the anger came: after all of his promises, after for the first time in my life I had allowed myself to believe that I would actually love someone and be loved – forever – in the way that is right, by the person who was right – it was all just a fallacy. A fucking fallacy that he let me hold onto in order to satisfy his own egotistical insanity and his selfish need to be loved.

I’m all for the supposed order of the grieving process, but anger had never hit me like this. Sometime in December, I had accepted that we were no longer together, and that it might even be for the better. And it was okay. But it was like I had skipped that step of feeling angry. Sure, I’d felt the occasional spurt of feeling slightly pissed off, of seeing things with renewed clarity, such as “oh wow he snooped through my stuff and probably even read my emails,” but I had never felt angry. I had felt like things made more sense and that I had understood him a little better, but I had not felt angry. For me, the anger came later than the acceptance, and according to traditional psychology, I should have had this all wrapped up in December.

Thursday night was probably the first of many dates I’ll go on, with the first of many people, but for me it was something else. Getting ready to go out with someone I could potentially like was not the beginning of a chapter I could entitle "Dating Again" – it was, more importantly, the end of one. In a classic TV moment, in my favorite episode of Friends, Rachel puts it quite dramatically before throwing a stranger’s cell phone into a glass of water: “and that, my friend, is what they call CLOSURE.” And although it's months after the fact, maybe I did need to go through that bit of anger before achieving full closure, and maybe it needed to be triggered by something. I'll never hate him, but I guess I did need to be angry, at least for a little while. I’m not exactly glad that the tears chose that moment, those hours, but they needed to be released and I let myself release them. Yet in doing so, I was not opening a window, but I was firmly acknowledging that the door, a door I never thought would have even needed to be built, had not merely been slammed shut but had been locked and bolted for good.

Once Upon a Time...

Ten years ago, as a part of my parents’ divorce settlement, my father insisted on collecting family “memorabilia.” Not being particularly inclined to part with my own memorabilia, one night, on a college break and with an evening to myself, I painstakingly filtered through old VHS cassettes, trying to keep what “we” could (for my mother’s sake, mostly, was how I justified my parsimonious attitude). So, for the entire night, I fast-forwarded through and rewound again live childhood images. Thankfully, most of the tapes had been recorded by my father, whose visual presence I desired to eliminate altogether from the screen. But as tends to happen when things are trying to be wished away, suddenly and without warning, there he was in front of me.

The four of us sat on a couch – my father, my two younger brothers, and me – and the camera was evidently being supported by a tripod. I was around four, old enough to be reading aloud; the boys were squirmy and not yet two. My father sat between his sons and his daughter, his eyes looking sideways at the book in her hand but mostly forward at the camera. “Come on,” he intoned, “you know what to do.” “I know Daddy, I know. I say it right.” “Say it right or what, LM?” “Say it right or I get whacks.”

I watched that scene and, at eighteen years old, for the first time became physically ill due to something I knew had no immediate physical cause.

I don’t know when I stopped reading for pleasure. Because at one time reading was my one of my only pleasures. I do know that I spent a lot of time in my junior high school years silently and mentally referring to myself in the third person, as if I were a character in a book, so that I could effectively handle the experiences with which I was faced at home. “She stepped off of the school bus and trudged across the lawn to the side-front door, where she knew the mother-figure would be awaiting her. She wondered how to ask for the snack that she might need, and if not, if she should dump her backpack in the hallway and quickly retreat to the bathroom, trying to discern the mood of the mother-figure and then what she should do next.” I know that I also read then as an “escape” – and that somewhere I began reading books about people my age I wished I could be. The Babysitters Club eventually moved to Sweet Valley High, yet those were entertaining books, and I still relished the words and the structure of the books assigned in school – A Tale of Two Cities quickly comes to mind.

Now, I am envious of my peers, friends, colleagues, acquaintances who still read for enjoyment. There are a number of reasons I can immediately put up as to why I don’t do the same (such as a limited attention span), but writing and reading are something at which I used to be – so said my teachers – quite talented, and which I miss.

I don’t have that iron fist (pun not initially intended, but accepted) in the form of my father governing the necessity that I read perfectly any longer, but its implications might be further reaching than I understand. One of the first steps towards this understanding is probably admitting its existence, and, in a little way, I have just done so right now.

Oh My - I Have "Rules" Too

I met the cutest boy a few weeks ago. And, invoking my friend B’s specialty, I made out with him outside of the bar in which I met him. And, of course, I ran into him again this weekend at the same bar. At some point afterwards it occurred to me that he was born in – late – 1981. Considering this, I’m figuring I left high school about 5-6 years before he did - which means he was in middle school or, oh no, elementary school. But, in the fashion of other bloggers (whom I’m guessing adopted this trend from early episodes of Sex and the City), the boy must have a name. So he is clearly "1981 boy". Maybe he’ll be the topic of another entry, and maybe he won’t. The important thing here is that last night when I called him (back) for the first time, I realized I have always inadvertently followed certain personal, definitive rules when I call (or call back) a boy for the first time. Here is my attempt to put them into writing:

1) Never be absolutely sober. This means that the call itself plays an integral role in the entire night. Not only does the time of the call need to be planned in order to allow for the perfect amount of buzzed-but-not-so-drunk-it’s-evident-ness, but any activities following the call can’t necessitate being sober. The night is the call.

2) Never be entirely wasted either. Reasons for this should be obvious.

3) Always straighten hair and put on makeup and cute outfit. Look good, feel good, sound good – I entirely believe in that. Sometimes I sit in my favorite bra in front of the mirror to feel hotter while talking. They say someone can tell if you’re smiling when you’re talking on the phone, so… isn’t this a natural extension of that theory?

4) Always work out beforehand. Endorphins = feel good. Also, I have this strange idea that if I let some of myself out into the world that day (by burning things off), I’ll have more space to take newness in. If it’s impossible to work out, then workout clothes can be substituted for the above-mentioned cute outfit. Sort of like the Pavlovian theory – in such clothes, I think I’ve worked out and therefore the endorphins will flow. Workout clothes are always still accompanied by hair in a (cute, generally to-the-side) ponytail and yes, light makeup - I mean, some artistic license is necessary.

5) Always have a fairly interesting story about what I did that day. Even if it incorporates aspects of what I did yesterday, it doesn't matter - as long as the rendition is waterproof.

6) Never talk too much. I can talk to a clock or a light. I want to know what he really thinks - so I don't want to unconsciously lead anyone into a certain way of speaking or type of conversation that's not actually indicative of the way he is. Because eventually, if I do end up dating someone, I want to learn a lot from him. That’s pretty much how I feel about all of my friends and this is no different – it’s just a more intense approach to a potentially more intense situation.

So I’m hanging out with 1981 boy Thursday night. More to come – maybe.

But At Least It's Something

I’ve been waiting to write because there’s this story I REALLY need to tell about my day on Friday – and it's a funny story, one about which I sigh and laugh and proudly think to myself “only in New York” (although I’m certain it’s the type of day nearly everyone has had, but there’s a prevailing attitude in New York City that these things do happen “only in New York.” I actually wonder if that phrase is becoming like an adjective that precedes types of days, or encounters, or stories, yet ones that do happen, to everyone, everywhere: "I had an 'only in New York' experience, today, honey" (says someone in Kansas).

In any case, my not being able to accurately relay my day in words – to my standards – has precluded me from writing anything at all. I have a good story to tell, and I am absolutely incapable of telling it. I want to tell it right. I want to convey the proper amount of humor and light-heartedness and irony that the story warrants. Perhaps in even building it up this much I’ll never be able to tell it. Or, perhaps, I’ll work on it at strange hours, and I’ll peck away at the details, pulling out entire scenes and changing tenses and persons and tones until one day it blooms into an entirely different form, maybe as a dialogue-only entry or as a series of vignettes, and I will then post it as “One Day in New York...”

What I have just realized is that I need to stop feeling like this. Period. Contrary to what it may seem I've just said, primarily it's not my lack of writing ability that bothers me. At all. What does strike that proverbial chord is that this is what I’ve done to people I’ve cared about very deeply in the past: if I don’t feel that I have anything great to say, anything that is of monumental significance or that is particularly impressive (in either the positive or horrifying sense), then I just won’t say anything at all. And I’ll drop off all types of communication, because why would s/he want to hear about the nothing that I’ve been doing, the non-interesting person that I am right now? Yet isn’t this what I thought I had conquered at the beginning of this year? Hadn’t I gotten over my issues with not communicating with people because of thinking I’m not good enough, wise enough, funny or insightful or empathetic or clever enough? Isn’t this how I’ve let friendships slide away, leading me down the ugly brick road that shuts doors that I don’t want to be shut at all? I am not fucking perfect, and sometimes, my writing or my life or my stories will just plain suck. But it does NOT make people – at least the type of people I want in my life – any less willing to hear from me. In fact, I think all of the people that I want in my life actually do think they suck sometimes. Of course, they’re wrong, and so also am I wrong, right now.

So I’m calling my own bullshit here. I’m saying, fuck you, LM, just speak, girl. Okay, so I had a chaotic and insanely amusing day on Friday. And some day I’ll recapture that day again and it will flow out of me naturally. Or maybe it won’t. But to my few readers now (readers whom I have admittedly cajoled into reading this), I won’t stop writing merely because I judge myself as not being able to tell that one story well enough for them to read. Since Friday, a lot has happened; I have had my usual share of adventures and misadventures, both inside of my head and in the outside world. And I’ve refused to write about them, because I have gotten stuck on perfecting that one fucking story first. If all this entry turns out to be is nothing but a) a confirmation of the fact that yes, I do want to keep writing, because I have something to say and b) mediocre clichés about the process of writing (bore, bore, bore) – then at least I have written SOMETHING.

Which is more than I would have done in the past. So I'll slap myself five and move it on along to the next entry.

"Smart"

My grandmother lives in an assisted-living community near my hometown. Inevitably, other grandparents of people I grew up with live there, and, inevitably, their grandchildren pay them holiday visits. Recently, when my grandmother told one of her friend’s now grown grandchildren who I was, my former classmate’s response was: “Oh, yeah, I remember her. She was...smart.”

"Smart" is the label I was tagged with; good at school is what I was forced to be; smart is how I will forever be remembered. And smart is what I tried to get away from when I went away to college, when I traveled the West Coast and then made my own home in New York City and began working in the bar industry. I didn’t want to be smart. Smart to me meant I was still that scared, nerdy junior high girl with glasses, braces, and perpetually untameable hair who was too shy to speak to nearly anyone and who never felt she had anything to offer to people, because "smart" wasn't even something she had chosen - it was merely an adjective attached to her head so her father could proudly show her off to his colleagues as his offspring. So in New York, I worked hard to craft what I thought was my own identity. I wanted to look and be and seem everything I hadn't been, everything Ithought I wanted to be and had never been able to be - pretty, outgoing, confident - anything that was antithetical to my associations with "smart."

I left my old hometown twelve years ago. I finally entered graduate school this past fall. When my letter of acceptance came in the mail last spring, I screamed out loud to the stranger opening her mailbox next to me and scrambled through my bag for my cell phone to start calling anyone I knew to tell them "I GOT IN!" - all the while thinking I can't believe they let me in...I'm not that smart. But thus far I've proven that I can more than hold my own in school. More importantly, I'm doing what I want to do, at the place I want to be, working my ass off to get the best grades I can for no one else but myself. Because I’ve come full circle. Because I know I can be many things and not just one. And oddly, I often come off as ditzy now, but it just doesn't matter to me. Because I know that I’m smart. Because I want to be.

Roller Skates to Pink Stilettos

The first birthday party I remember hosting was in third grade. It was a roller-skating party (yes, having been cool in the early 80’s, this type of function is probably cool again) and I wore a florescent pink and black sweatshirt and black leggings. Everything was set up before I got there. The invitations were sent out to all the girls in my class, the Carvel ice cream cake was ordered weeks in advance, and the music and lighting were certainly determined by the skating rink (and probably determined some of our newest favorite songs. Borderline, anyone?) My biggest worry that afternoon was falling down on my skates.

Friday evening I’m hosting the first party I’ve ever solely been responsible for. It’s here, at my very own apartment. And evidently I have no idea what I’m doing since I've started about twenty projects and have finished none of them - at the moment the living room rug is lifted up (because I had to sweep under it, although I got halfway there and realized this requires moving the furniture, so, more accurately, the rug is half-lifted up); about five random web pages are open on my desktop as a part of my search for appetizer recipes; boxes of 40, 75 and 100-watt light bulbs and various cleaning solutions are in a CVS bag in the corner because I’m convinced I need to change every light bulb in the apartment to create the perfect ambience as well as (yuck) scrub the bathroom floor; and every single “delicate” piece of laundry I own has been washed and hangs on my shower rod, bedroom entrance, the ladder that is in the middle of the kitchen (obviously, so I can change the lightbulbs), and anywhere else I can find to stick the laundry. And all the while I’m watching Law & Order CI out of one eye, thinking that the guy who’s currently being accused of murder on TV looks like my ex and, shit, even has the same name. I'm pretty sure that if he wasn’t an actor and, come to think of it, a fake accused murderer who cut out people’s calf muscles and ate the flesh of his victims, I would probably have a crush on him.

And around and around I go. Back to the party planning. Thank God I have a friend who’s in the “business” and who has volunteered to help me set up on Friday afternoon. At this age, I am worrying about “what if no one comes” (and its converse, what if too many people come and my tiny one-bedroom is woefully inadequate in space, seating or, worst of all, liquor supply), what I'm going to wear (although I could probably recycle the black leggings), from where to order a birthday cake, what else to serve, how to set up the space... and I haven't even thought about the music. After all of this worrying, come Friday night, chances are I’ll drink myself into such a stupor that I’ll have forgotten to worry about what I did twenty years ago (with just a minor change in the footwear): falling down, this time in my pink stiletto heels.

To Tell or Not to Tell

New to this blogger world, I have a lot of questions. The first is the most basic, a content-oriented question - how much to reveal? The second is indirectly but inextricably linked to the first - whom to tell? I mean, as much as this is an exercise to feel out my own experiences, I would have just bought another cloth-bound journal and begun writing in that if I really didn't want anybody else reading this. And, since I suspect that many important people in my life will in some way appear in here as unwitting characters, do I even want them to know? Will their knowing preclude me from writing entirely honestly?

My ex-boyfriend used to tell me that I "sugarcoat" things. He meant this in a condescending - not in a nice - way: LM, you're sugarcoating again, just come on and say what you really mean. But I've never seen things as simply black and white, and sugarcoating could just be my way of expressing a lack of absolute judgment and instead my perceived nuances of persons, of situations - myself, himself, and aspects of our defunct relationship included. Either that, or I was afraid he wouldn't love me anymore if I expressed my real opinions, a gut feeling that ended up becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy or a strange coincidence on the night he found - as he was filtering through my things while I was in the shower - an old, cloth-bound journal of mine in which one entry had been written when I was drunk and angry at him. There was no sugarcoating in those pages, and while what I had written was long-forgotten to me, it was unforgivable to him.

I don't want to sugarcoat here. I want to write for me. And perhaps retaining anonymity is a strong step towards ensuring I can do that.

Thus far I have only told three people about this blog, trusted people, people I can't imagine having a negative thought about - ever. But I've trusted people before who have betrayed me (the above-mentioned ex heading the list), and I know I'm not perfect either in that realm. Because sometimes, what is unequivocally private to one person falls under the "no big deal" category to another, and in that way, secrets become non-secrets as gates that were once locked begin opening, slowly and creakily at first, until before you know it the doors are swung wide open and an avalanche of consequences ensues. And for me, the worst of these consequences would be hurting someone I love.

Inside The Boxes

I didn't believe it then, and (quick math: 2006-1994 = 12) twelve years later, I'm still not so sure I believe it. Moving away, moving on makes you stronger.

You’ll see. You’ll change. I wasn’t ready to swallow that as a seventeen-year old watching everyone she knew disperse into different regions of the country. And of course, inevitably, I changed. But while I assume that people change in prison, too, does that make it an experience everyone should go through?

Too many losses later, too many movings on for the sake of – of what? of moving on? – I am very aware that I have changed and, yes, grown. But how many times is it necessary to move sideways before you stop adding and filling in pieces of yourself and you begin leaving too many behind, some of them falling away without your even noticing them?

One October I packed up my things and moved myself to San Francisco because I needed to escape problems that were too large for me to grasp. I thought I could fold them neatly into a box and tie it up tightly and hop on the Southwest Airlines Providence-Baltimore-Kansas City-Oakland flight and that the box would stay put where I had left it. Six months later, I realized that my problems had done some escaping of their own, that they had left the box and I had unknowingly carried them with me until they eventually seeped so deeply into my mind that all I could see was gray.

I begin 2006 happy and content, independent and yes, strong. But I am also beginning to wonder about all of those pieces of me that have stayed behind in boxes. Last weekend, visiting my childhood home, I stood on a chair to reach the top shelf of my closet and grabbed one of the shoeboxes that are filled with letters from people I have loved, people who evidently at some point loved me enough to write me letters. Sitting cross-legged on the floor of my old room, I re-read years and years worth of letters that had not been touched since I'd opened them for the first time. I laughed, I cried, and I remembered a whole lot of great times and people who have been pieces of me. Who have helped me to be who I am now. And I desperately miss some of those people.

For some reason this year I am ready to start filling in those pieces. Most likely many of them won’t fit anymore, and that’s fine, because the only risk in reaching out is finding that out – I mean, for all intents and purposes they’re already gone in body anyway. And if I find even one of my missing pieces to be open, receptive, and perhaps even searching for their own missing pieces, and if our pieces still fit our changed versions of ourselves, then that will, to me, be a beautiful thing.